Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog found an interesting reference to a "magic inbox" in Gmail"s code this morning. In addition, there are also references to an "icebox-inbox" and the ability to sort mail by priority. Google has been relatively tepid with regards to adding features that exploit a user"s social graph, but these references seem to point towards a system where Google could organize a user"s mail based on the strength of this user"s connection with the sender and not just based on the time a message arrived.

For a lot of us, our most meaningful social network is still represented in our email inboxes, and if anybody should be able to use this data and turn it into an interesting application, it would surely be Google.

Gmail Labs already has a feature that allows users to view multiple inboxes at the same time, so this new feature could potentially be built on top of this, with an inbox with high-priority messages at the top and the rest of the messages at the bottom.

Is this a Useful Way to Organize Mail?

Whether this is necessarily a better way to organize mail is a different question. After all, there is also a lot of implicit information in when a message was sent. That said, though, a lot of us have hundreds or even thousands of unread messages (at least those of us that haven"t become a slave to the inbox zero philosophy), so it will be interesting to see if this new feature (if indeed it is real) will be able to help us to organize our dysfunctional inboxes.

Note: we searched the Gmail code for the references to the "Magic Inbox" ourselves and came away empty-handed. Chances are, that Google is only testing this for a small number of users right now.